Data Life Cycle Fact Sheets

Education Modules

With our Education Modules, you can train your data management skills and obtain general information about data management. You can either use them for your own training or to train others. They are licensed under CC-BY-NC, so you can use them for non-commercial purposes as long as you give credit to GFBio, like suggested in the last slides.

Software Training Materials

In this section you can find software recommendations and associated training materials for the management of biodiversity data. GFBio cooperates with two German developer groups that provide open source platforms for biodiversity data management (Diversity Workbench & BEXIS2).

Diversity Workbench (DWB)

DWB is a modularized workbench that serves as virtual research environment for the management and analysis of various kinds of biodiversity and geoscience data. It can be set up and run by institutions as well as individual researchers. A mobile version, Diversity Mobile, can be used to collect data in the field.

BEXIS 2

BEXIS 2 is a modular scalable platform for the management of biodiversity data (during project lifetime), designed for large research projects and collaborative project consortia having central data management including a data manager.

Webinars / screencasts / media

How semantic search can improve your search results (screencast)

Data Submission Templates

If you are looking for recommended data structures, find some examples of our partners. Using them will simplify your data submission to GFBio.

To facilitate data submission for scientists interested in depositing their project results, GFBio provides standard excel templates commonly used in the involved natural history collections to document records on either biological and environmental physical samples (voucher objects) along with associated data on geographical and temporal occurrence or on observational data without deposition of physical vouchers, which is often the case in the context of established long-term monitoring projects.

Best-Practices

Alejandra Sarmiento Soler, Mara Ort, Juliane Steckel This 50-page booklet, co-produced by GFBio, is an introduction to data management in the BEFmate project, where BExIS 1 is used. It covers each step in the data life cycle and includes examples, resources, recommendations for further reading, and a glossary.

Carly Strasser, Robert Cook, William Michener, Amber Budden Objective of this Primer: The goal of data management is to produce self-describing data sets. If you give your data to a scientist or colleague who has not been involved with your project, will they be able to make sense of it? Will they be able to use it effectively and properly? This primer describes a few fundamental data management practices that will enable you to develop a data management plan and to effectively create, organize, manage, describe, preserve, and share data.

GFBio Consortium

The German Federation for Biological Data (GFBio), a sustainable, service oriented, national data infrastructure facilitating data sharing for biological and environmental research.